Formula 1 trumpeted the 75th anniversary of the world championship with a glitzy season launch at London’s O2. The first and indeed the last of its kind – for, while it was declared an incredible success by the commercial rights holder, there will be no similar events in the foreseeable future. Go figure.
To an extent, the F1 75 launch demonstrated how far the category has come since the last attempt to stage such a combined effort, 15 years earlier. In 2010 the Formula One Teams Association, the now-moribund entity set up to fight the corner of the competitors but even then collapsing under the weight of its internal divisions, tried to coordinate a joint launch, but the enterprise came to naught. FOTA had, more or less, been set up to drum FIA president Max Mosley out of office; with him gone, its sense of shared purpose had evaporated. Come 2010, the various parties of the first part, thoroughly divided and ruled by Bernie Ecclestone during negotiations for the next Concorde Agreement, couldn’t even agree what biscuits to serve at such a launch, let alone a date or time for the putative shindig.
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– The Autosport.com Team